A worldwide fervor over climate change orthodoxy: Christopher Essex

Can you hear me? You've been incognizant, but it's over and you're going to be OK. Take deep breaths and relax until your vision clears.

The world is not going to end because of climate change, at least not in the near future.

You are a most fortunate individual. You have been a participant in the biggest inter-dimensional cross rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909! No wait, that's Ghostbusters.

Let me put it differently: There has never been anything quite like this - ever.

The entire world has been embroiled in a persistent, free-floating global fervor (and a really nasty one, too) allegedly based on fervor-less, dispassionate science.

Recently, there was a huge explosion in the climate change orthodoxy factory that was set off by objective evidence we have been deceived and manipulated.

The evidence was the leaked e-mails of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), which are now subject to several official investigations, forcing the head of the CRU to step aside. The e-mails tell a lurid tale of unbecoming, unwarranted, organized and fierce hostility to skeptical climatic researchers, as well as data tampering, anti-scientific secrecy, manipulations of scientific journals, and distortions of peer review that make George Orwell look like a prophet.

This could be dismissed as an isolated case if the CRU were some marginal backwater. But what was produced there was central to the scientific case, such as it was, mounted by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The CRU was global warming central! That makes the recent admission by its deposed head to the BBC stunning. He said there was actually no statistically significant global warming for 15 years. That's contrary to more than a decade of overheated, hysterical rhetoric and news stories, ultimately based in large part on the CRU's now-discredited positions.

Of course the counter spin was desperate and pathetic: The e-mails were illegally obtained; it was a plot by skeptics/deniers funded by corporations, facilitated by foreign governments; OK, it's bad, but even putting CRU data aside there's still "overwhelming" evidence.

This was blown away in the subsequent explosion of pent-up complaints about faulty science that have been hushed up for years by silencing skeptics and likening them to criminals.

With new eyes paying attention to the complaints, what was old seemed new.

For example, one IPCC myth was even debunked before it was adopted. In the first, 2002, edition of my book, Taken By Storm, with Ross McKitrick we showed the Himalayan glaciers were not at risk due to global warming. Yet this invention, attributed to the World Wildlife Federation, still appeared, five years afterward, in the 2007 IPCC report.

The IPCC author responsible subsequently admitted he put it in to scare people.

Finally in 2009, seven years afterward, the head of the IPCC had to answer embarrassing questions about it.

Rule number one: Don't believe anything you read or hear in the news about ice. Count on it to be a tart up of a pre-tarted position.

So many of these seemingly "new" one-sided "errors" have burst out that unanticipated developments ensued: India threatened to pull out of the IPCC, Greenpeace called for the head of the IPCC's head, while IPCC stalwarts rushed to distance themselves from the IPCC.

It's been like watching the conclusion of a classic Bond movie where an enormous explosion consumes Dr. No's fortress.

The serious damage of the great fervor was not from these noisy secondary cultural explosions. It was from the sustained, immoral attacks on scientific skepticism and skeptical scientists. The attacks began the moment science became subordinate to policy.

That is corruption of science, and we will all eventually suffer if it is not consciously stopped.

- Dr. Christopher Essex is

a professor of applied mathematics at the University

of Western Ontario and co-author of Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming